Confessed mass murderer didn't do it

A Swedish man who was jailed for 8 murders, having confessed to as many as 30, has admitted that he lied to police in order to maintain his supply of drugs.

Transcript

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: For almost two decades Thomas Quick was known as Sweden's worst serial killer.

Quick was convicted of eight murders and admitted to killing more than 20 others.

But it turns out he wasn't a serial killer, rather, he was a serial liar.

Thomas Quick was actually the alter ego of Sture Bergwall, a mentally ill man who was jailed for a botched bank robbery 23 years ago. As he neared release, Burgwell told therapists he'd committed a series of bizarre and grotesque murders, but it took authorities years to realise he was simply making it all up, with the last three murder convictions against him only overturned a few days ago.

Philip Williams travelled to Sweden to meet the serial killer who wasn't.

PHILIP WILLIAMS, REPORTER: These are the eyes of a monster, a killer so depraved he readily confessed to 30 murders, sexually assaulting men, women and children, crimes committed throughout Scandinavia, his newly-adopted name Thomas Quick synonymous with evil. But it was all a lie.

Why did you start making these confessions?

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): First and foremost I was given drugs. That was absolutely the central issue. I was given drugs and I also felt a sense of belonging to this place, along with the psychologist and some others.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: So in effect you're saying you were creating these fantasies to feed your drug habit?

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): Yes, absolutely, exactly.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Sture Bergwall's drug-fed confessions meant an extra two decades in this secure psychiatric ward, but he says his therapists, the police and prosecutors failed to pick up obvious mistakes in his horrifying stories.

How did you research each particular case?

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): Very little, very, very little. Most of the information I got from the police interrogation, the policeman who questioned me and gradually gave me more and more information during questioning, so in each case there were many interviews and that's how I gathered the main portion of the information.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: So in some ways they were interrogating you, but in another way you were interrogating them?

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): Yes, it was like a collaboration.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Do you have any doubts at all that he's completely innocent of all those crimes?

THOMAS OLSSON, BERGWALL'S LAWYER: No doubt soever.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Ever since Sture Bergwall recanted his confessions in 2008, lawyer Thomas Olsson has been trying to overturn the convictions. He says police and prosecutors should never have gone after him in the first place.

THOMAS OLSSON: He can for example in the case with the Norwegian girl, he describes how he counts to a small village with a lot of wooden house in the middle of the day and he see this blonde girl coming in her trousers and he kill her. In reality the girl had black hair, she was living in a suburb and it was eight in the evening and it was raining.

So that was his first story and then they helped him to change that. So step by step he changed his story that she was blonde, that it was suburban, not the village and so on.

The relatives to the victims have the right to know why this person, Thomas Quick, could invade their memory and their grief and who is responsible for letting him do that.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: The man I'm about to meet knows all too well the pain inflicted by the false confessions.

BJORN ASPLUND, VICTIM'S FATHER: Welcome.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Thank you very much. Can I come aboard?

BJORN ASPLUND: Yes, please.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: The welcome is warm, but the memories are chilling. Bjorn Asplund's 11-year-old son, Johan, disappeared in 1980. Sture Bergwell, his name then changed to Thomas Quick, admitted he had murdered him.

BJORN ASPLUND: I miss my son as my son and I miss also Johan as a good friend.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Bjorn Asplund always believed another man he knows murdered his son, but he had to endure the pain of listening in court to Thomas Quick detailing a sickening but fictitious killing.

BJORN ASPLUND: How he took his body and slaughtered my son and he ate some parts of the body and, you know, the most horrible things.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Who do you blame?

BJORN ASPLUND: The prosecutor and the team around him and therapist and his doctors. They put me - and not only me, all the relatives to his so-called victims. They are the ones who are responsible for this, not Thomas. He is also a victim.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: You always believed he was innocent?

BJORN ASPLUND: Yes.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: He was not alone. Investigative journalist Hannes Rastam was also sceptical and eventually in 2008 Sture Bergwall admitted his horrendous lies. A book and a documentary detailing a story of drug-induced confessions and botched investigations triggered a series of acquittals.

So, you probably know more about this man than he knows about himself?

JENNY KUTTIM, JOURNALIST: Yes. I think I would have won Jeopardy if he was the topic.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Journalist Jenny Kuttim worked for five years on the case with Hannes Rastam, who died last year.

What evidence did you find linking this man to these murders?

JENNY KUTTIM: None. When I started turning all the stones, it turns out there were no physical evidence, no technical evidence and really not - no indications that Sture Bergwall was supposedly the killer.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: What would have happened if you and he had not investigated this?

JENNY KUTTIM: I think that we still would have a serial killer in Sweden, even though he didn't do any of the murders.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: One of the most disturbing aspects of this whole story is the fact that the real killers are still out there. They haven't been caught. They got away with murder to date. But even if police reopened those cold, cold cases, the statute of limitations means they'll never be convicted and justice will not be served.

BJORN ASPLUND: We don't know where he is, we don't know how much he had to suffer before he was killed and we don't even have a place to go. We haven't had the opportunity to bury him.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: And in the meantime, the man you believe murdered your son is free.

BJORN ASPLUND: His killer is still out there, free.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Do you think you'll ever get justice?

BJORN ASPLUND: No.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Despite the acquittals, legal process means Sture Bergwall will remain locked up for months. There's been no apology from any authority to date, but when he is finally free, he'd like to meet the relatives of the victims he so traumatised.

What would you say to them?

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): I'm sorry. That's the only thing I can say.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: This is obviously a very emotional area for you.

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): Absolutely.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Tell me why.

STURE BERGWELL (subtitle translation): Because today I can understand how badly affected they were during the Thomas Quick years, how bad it was.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Sture Bergwall says the Thomas Quick monster he was is dead. He told me when he is eventually released, he just wants to walk free in the forest, but what remains of the unsolved cases, the grief and a medical and legal system that utterly failed? And demands for a full independent inquiry to ensure it never happens again.

EMMA ALBERICI: Philip Williams reporting there.

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